Robinhood, a free stock brokerage app, announced that it will offer free ethereum and bitcoin trading in February 2018.
Famous for its free stock trading concept, Robinhood comes out of its comfort zone and confidently dives into the cryptocurrency world through its Robinhood Crypto.
A representative from Robinhood said,
“Robinhood is the only brokerage app to offer stock and crypto trading under one platform.”
It recently announced that users residing in California, Massachusetts, Missouri, Montana and New Hampshire will be able to trade ethereum and bitcoin on its app for free 24/7 starting this February.
Currently, all of its customers can easily track 16 cryptocurrencies. These are Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, Ripple, Dash, Ethereum Classic, Monero, Stellar, Qtum, Bitcoin Gold, OmiseGo, NEO, Lisk, Zcash and Dogecoin.
Expansion of Robinhood’s offerings
According to Baiju Bhatt, one of the co-founders of Robinhood, he and his co-founder Vlad Tenev have already been researching about cryptocurrencies for a while.
He said in a telephone interview,
"Back in 2010 or 2011, we were mining bitcoin. If we noticed one thing about cryptocurrencies it is that they have this incredible resiliency to them."
Their company which has been known as the darling of younger and inexperienced traders has been working on the expansion of their offerings for over a year already. Through Robinhood Gold, they rolled out margin trading. Additionally, they launched a web platform last year and started to offer free options trading to its users.
Furthermore, Bhatt said that the new cryptocurrency offering they will have will be tied to “Robinhood’s ethos of democratizing financial services and toppling the old guard of Wall Street.”
Robinhood Crypto’s launch as a strategic move
Moreover, Robinhood is one of the first non-crypto companies to try to have a break in the cryptocurrency trading market. This can be seen as a strategic move since the current market now is known for its outages, high fees and long periods of downtime.
Bhatt mentioned that the company is now focusing on onboarding new clients and making sure that they can handle a large volume of transactions. He explained:
"Crypto is going to change the world and we want to help drive that. Today, our business transacts 10,000 different symbols in equities and ETFs. We see millions of trades a day. In our brokerage industry, there is no excuse for downtime. We plan on bringing that mindset to the crypto space. We don't view any of that stuff as acceptable."